Weidman Talks Injury That Has Sidelined Him

During a recent edition of The MMA Hour, former UFC Middleweight Champion Chris Weidman told host Ariel Helwani that an injury has kept him from competing in the Octagon for nearly a year.

As reported by MMA Fighting, Weidman suffered a torn thumb ligament during the opening round of his bout last July with Kelvin Gastelum. And while it sounded like a normal injury with a decent return timetable, it proved to be anything but.

“After the fight, I ended up going to the doctor and I found that I needed to get surgery, so I got the surgery,” Weidman said. “They took a tendon out of my wrist and used that to create a new ligament from my thumb. And they told me it was going to be kind of a quick recovery. It ended up being eight months until I realized that, I guess, during the trauma of the surgery, the bones — when they drilled through the bones, it’s a very one-in-a-million chance, the blood supply didn’t come back to the bones, so the bones were like falling apart.

They crushed all the cartilage between the joint, and it was pretty painful for the last eight months as I was trying to train and get through it.

Weidman eventually underwent a second injury to fix the issue with his bones. He has since rehabbing the injury, wearing a special cast, and using a “bone stimulator” to help speed up the recovery process.